Mentorship Meets AI: Building the Future of Our Engineering Workforce

Engineering is at a turning point when it comes to talent acquisition. Many firms are looking for an engineer who has five to 10 years of experience, but someone with this range of experience has always been the hardest to find. The engineering talent pool is small, and many firms are fishing in the same waters. So if buying talent isn’t an option, what is? That’s where mentorship makes a difference.

Growing Talent from the Ground Up

At Erdman Anthony, we’ve doubled down on building from within. We are an employee-owned firm, and that shapes how we think about our talent. Since being employee-owned keeps the focus on people, mentorship is part of how we sustain ourselves. Some of the most rewarding moments in my career have been watching entry-level engineers and interns grow into solid project engineers and leaders.

That’s what convinces me the mentorship approach works. For midsize multidisciplinary engineering firms like ours, a sustainable strategy is to grow our own talent from the ground up — and I’ve experienced it firsthand.

Mentorship: a Sustainable Strategy 

The best way to protect the future of any firm isn’t by chasing midlevel hires. It’s by making sure the next generation is prepared and excited to take on challenges. Mentorship is how we do that. It’s about building depth on the bench, providing continuity for clients, and shaping leaders who are technically sound and have the business sense to make projects successful and profitable.

I started at Erdman Anthony as an intern. After graduation, I spent five years at another Rochester-area firm, but I stayed in touch with the people here. The relationships I built and the mentorship I received early on stuck with me. Eventually, I returned, and that decision was rooted in the knowledge that Erdman Anthony had invested in me from the very start.

I’m not the only example. Many successful Erdman Anthony employees have come up through our co-op program. We have also hired plenty of entry-level engineers who didn’t start here as co-ops, and they also flourished because of the same focus on people and mentorship. Whether someone begins as a co-op, an intern, or a brand-new hire, they succeed when they are given meaningful work early on and are supported by mentors who teach not just what to do, but why it matters.

Our Rochester office’s co-op and entry-level talent typically comes from the University at Buffalo, Rochester Institute of Technology, and other regional colleges and universities. Regardless of where they come from, the mentorship process is the same: invest in them from day one, help them grow, and they will turn into long-term contributors who understand the “why” behind the work. That’s what creates loyalty, trust, synergy, and camaraderie.

What Mentorship Looks Like in Engineering

Mentorship is a responsibility, especially in engineering, which has always been an apprenticeship profession. Knowledge is passed down through experience, repetition, and problem-solving on real projects, not through manuals and standards.

It is best accomplished in real-life, person-to-person settings. Fully remote and hybrid work have their advantages, but mentorship becomes harder when teams aren’t physically together. Young engineers grow by overhearing how problems are solved, watching how a manager handles a tough challenge, and attending meetings or joining in field visits. Those types of lessons happen organically and can’t be scheduled during a video conference. They happen because people are present, working together.

For me, mentorship means full immersion. I bring younger engineers to meetings, copy them on emails, and involve them in every part of the work I do. My goal is to train them to do what I do as quickly as possible so they can advance, which also makes my job easier. Watching them succeed is what excites me.

Of course, this is a two-way street. Junior engineers have to want to succeed. They have to ask questions, show drive, and use every opportunity to grow. Identifying that ambition early is one of the most important things a manager can do. When both sides are invested, that’s when mentorship can truly work.

How AI Enables Mentorship

Project demands keep increasing. Designs are more complex, and clients expect quicker turnarounds. Everyone is stretched thin. That’s where AI has started to make a difference.

The biggest impact of AI so far hasn’t been on our entry-level staff; it’s been on senior and midlevel engineers. AI can now handle a lot of the busy work, including digging through endless email chains and pulling together meeting notes.

AI can produce a helpful first draft, but you never accept it without checking it. Oversight still matters. AI saves time. It handles some of the routine tasks so senior engineers can focus on guiding younger staff and explaining how to make good decisions.

This is where AI really earns its place. It allows our experienced engineers to spend less time on paperwork and more time where it matters when it comes to mentorship, which is sitting down with younger staff, reviewing their work, and having conversations that help them grow. AI offers a win-win: more time to work side-by-side with junior engineers and more time to focus on our clients.

How AI Can Impact Young Engineers 

The engineering workforce of the future will be built by firms that offer mentorship and strategize their efficient use of AI for that task.

We know we are just scratching the surface and still figuring out how AI will directly support younger engineers. The possibilities are exciting; I can see a path where they could use it to build calculators for repetitive checks, streamline progress reports, or even speed up estimating.

And none of that replaces their role. Rather, it accelerates their growth by removing some of the more tedious tasks so they can focus on reasons behind design decisions. AI can give our experienced staff more time to mentor, and it can give our younger staff a faster path to grow into strong engineers.

Building the Next Generation of Engineers 

At the end of the day, what sustains client relationships isn’t just results. Conscientiousness matters a lot. Delivering consistently, paying attention to detail, listening closely, and responding quickly are what earn trust. While technical ability is the backbone of what we do, what sets companies like us apart is showing that we genuinely care about successful outcomes for clients, not just technical deliverables.

Client focus has been one of the biggest building blocks of our firm’s success, and we work to instill this focus in all developing engineers. When new hires see they are making an immediate impact on the business and on clients, they buy in. That’s how mentorship helps retain talent: by giving new hires early opportunities to grow and showing them their work matters.

It really comes down to this: Expose younger engineers to real work, make time to teach, and use AI to cut out the busy work. Do that consistently, and you won’t just fill positions. You’ll grow leaders.

Rob Schiller is based at Erdman Anthony’s Rochester, NY, office.

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